Friday, February 20, 2009

Log Rollin'

Da gubmit wants you to keep your home wi-fi logs so police can go through them if they think they need to. This is why > /dev/null is your friend. And there is, as always, an economic consideration: As one Slashdot commentor posts, "Who is going to pay for the storage costs, backups, etc.? I'm not going to foot the bill for it or get fined because my cheap Linksys router dies after six months of use and I lose my logs."

My default thinking has always been to purge, purge, purge because you don't need to secure data that do not exist. The idea that home users' logs might be trolled only reinforces that view. How long before altering a device's log settings -- not trashing or altering logs, just changing how often something is logged, or where those logs are stored, etc. -- is itself a crime?